It’s been 9 long years since LSD and the Search for God blessed us with their distortion soaked self-titled EP and a lot has changed in the interim. Heaven is a Place with its steady walls of psychedelia in lieu of fluid curtains of reverb is the mark of a band that has truly evolved. Adapted. Matured. Grown up. it is the mark of a band that has recently recruited a Brian Jonestown Massacre member (hello, Ricky Maymi!).

Between the shoegaze-by-numbers self-titled and the swirl-heavy Heaven is a Place, we have two wildly disparate EPs before us. How do we know which one is best-suited to each of our unique, inimitable personalities?

I daresay we have found ourselves in the midst of a most egregious dilemma.

Fortunately, I have dedicated the last two weeks to intimately acquainting myself with both these records by playing them at very high volumes very late into the night and I believe I am now qualified to create and share an interactive guide that will solve all of our problems and assuage all of our fears.

Here’s the official guide to figuring out which LSD and the Search for God album is right for you:

YOUR RESULTS!

Mostly column 1: You’re a cynical bastard (that’s Diogenes in the picture) who smokes up to cool down, prefers listening to bands that make a lot of noise before anyone knows who they are but drops them the moment they go mainstream, i.e. someone apart from you knows them.

LSD and the Search for God’s self-titled EP is the album for you.

Your life in a lyric: Be careful what you wish for/Because it might come true (Starting Over)

Mostly column 2: You’re one of those irritating existential types who relies on psychedelics to distract you from your own impending mortality. You listen to a band’s later albums first, but assure everyone you knew who they were before they became who they are.

Heaven is a Place is the album for you.

Your life in a lyric: One thing I know/I’m gonna die (Without You)

—

Do the options in both columns look equally tempting? Dear god, you must be insufferable in person. Let’s be BFFs! Get your LSD and the Search for God goods here and we can be pricks – with unmatchable taste in music – together for all eternity.

It’s no secret that New Waves of Hope has been the album I’ve been looking forward to the most this year. Not least because I’ve known it to be in the making for about two years, and living off snippets, and whatever sneaky crumbs Alex threw my way.

New Waves of Hope released earlier this year, and while I was too busy earning a living (down with capitalism) to write a full blown article about it, I have still managed to land the chance to premiere the video for ‘We Meet In Dreams.’

‘Inspired’ by Mario 64 if Mario 64 had drug dealers and shots of Mario staring pensively at the user on a Shoreditch sidewalk, the video’s making full use of the cool-factor brought in by TMD’s skateboarding bassist, Cheryl, and the unshakeable Gavin (not even clomping through a metre-deep lake fazes him).

Where and why Alex/Mario got those overalls will remain a mystery forever.

Like this:

I don’t know how we skipped the usual suspects, but when talking about Blueneck’s influences, Rich throws a name at me that has me caught completely off-guard.

‘Phil Collins.‘

Pardon?

‘Phil Collins! You know Phil Collins?’

Yes, I know Phil Collins. Why are we talking about Phil Collins?

‘You’ve heard ‘In The Air Tonight’?’

Yes, I’ve heard ‘In The Air Tonight’. Why are we talking about Phil Collins?

‘Listen to the start of it again, and then listen to ‘Sirens’.’

I play ‘In The Air Tonight’ in my mind.

Dear god, it’s true.

—

The scourge of the One Song:

Rich calls on me to remember that dreadful ‘Rollercoaster’ track by Ronan Keating from a decade or two ago.

‘Do you remember how it went?’ he asks.

‘Yes, but I’d rather not.’

‘That’s OK. Do you know the New Radicals?’

‘Sure – that group with the one song.’

‘Yeah that’s them. Do you remember how that went?’

‘Sure,’ I’m about to start humming ‘You Get What You Give’ and it hits me.

‘It’s written by the same guy,’ he tells me.

‘They really only have the one song.’

—

The before-they-were-famous moment

‘I met Chris Martin’s parents,’ Rich tells me. I’ve been railing against Coldplay for about five minutes now. For a moment I feel like we’re two schoolteachers discussing a problem student. ‘I was at one of their early shows – there couldn’t have been more than 200 people there. There was this older couple sitting in the corner, and I got to talking with them. They told me their son was in the band. It was Chris Martin.’

—

Settling debates with Google:

‘My childhood dream was to be in a Right Said Fred video,’ I reveal.

‘Aren’t Right Said Fred gay?’

‘What? Surely not!’ I quote their lyrics to make my point.

Deeply dippy about those Spanish eyes, Sierra smile, Legs that go on for miles, and m…

‘Ah yes, one of them’s bisexual.’

—

On their name:

I’m so convinced about my own interpretation of Blueneck’s name, Rich doesn’t even get the chance to speak before I’ve launched into my exhaustive explanation the story behind their name. He hears me out patiently and after what must be a quarter of an hour tells me that I’m free to go with that as the story due to its overpowering glam factor. It’s not the real reason though. The Real Reason is so superbly unglamorous that I decide to keep my own illusions, and leave the truth shrouded in mystery.

I’m talking to Rich Sadler from Blueneck. We’re sitting across from each other 10,000 kilometres apart. He’s recounting a Radiohead-related tale of woe that befell his friend, and I’m pretending to be surprised to learn that Thom Yorke is a twat.

I joke – there’s never any need to convince me that Radiohead are a bunch of wankers. However, in keeping me from a life of shattered dreams and cynicism, Rich’s wisdomous advice appears to overlook one tiny detail:

I’m talking to Rich Sadler from Blueneck.

I refrain from telling him the damage is probably already done.

—-

Blueneck are not a group that frequents shoegaze circles. They aren’t even a name that pops up too frequently within the community. It could be because up until recently they hadn’t even the foggiest notion what to qualify their sound as. They’ve had the label ‘post-rock’ thrust upon them by over-enthusiastic third parties (independent publications not unlike this one, e.g.) but Blueneck never set out with any such intentions. No one in the group had even heard the term before having it stamped all over them.

Rich is one of the lucky few to have had the chance to be a fan of the band before being in the band. He recalls seeing them live before they’d released their first album, Scars of the Midwest, and wondering:

‘Why are they not huge?’

Then, when they toured for The Fallen Host, he toured with them.

‘Why are they not huge?’ – a standard reaction when you first hear Blueneck. I recall my own First Time; playing The Fallen Host while at work. Even under stark white light in the middle of the morning, ‘Low’ managed to stop my world. For a little over 9 minutes, it was just the two of us, spinning in infinity.

The live experience is a grandiosity that we scattered fans can only imagine.

How do they do it?

I can’t bring myself to ask the question, even though I’m longing to know the answer. Innate curiosity fights the urge to preserve the magic of the Blueneck sound by leaving technicalities shrouded in mystery.

Curiosity wins.

‘How do you do it?’

They live miles apart, the Bluenecks. They have lives and jobs. I can’t imagine how they find the time to be in the same room for more than a couple of hours every month. With both space and time against them, how is it even feasible for them to create anything at all?

Enter, the internet.

Spending hours in a studio writing, testing and recording tracks is a luxury most groups just cannot afford – least of all when they have to balance distance, families, work, and the basics of adult existence. Blueneck aren’t any different and Rich, being the furthest away from the others, makes a two and a half hour trek down to Bristol when the tracks are finally ready and it’s time to lay them down.

They’re not the first band to embrace the dropbox method of recording. Tears Run Rings rely on a similar technique, recording albums while divided by cities. Meanwhile, The Microdance make sure lyrics and composition are perfectly in place before they hit their Brick Lane studio (or Los Angeles) to churn out an album. Epilogue, Rich reveals, was recorded almost entirely remotely, and Rich and Duncan still have an album’s worth of songs waiting to be tracked.

‘They’re not Blueneck songs, though,’ he forewarns, pre-empting my apopleptic fit. The internet can only overcome the tyranny of distance by that much and Rich and Duncan’s project is both a resolution and an experiment. He seems intent on assuring me that Menace At The Dam has close to nothing to do with Blueneck, and I can’t tell whether to be excited or apprehensive about a potential departure from the established, accepted, worshipped norm.

Despite their elusiveness, Blueneck are far from unknown, scads of fans hang on to their every note, buy their albums, go to their gigs, and pick up their merch. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to be signed on by Denovali, but it does lead you to the obvious question:

File-sharing: good or bad?

It’s not a cut and dry question and Rich takes a while to respond. Understandably, he can’t take a definitive stance.

‘I’m torn,’ he tells me. ‘There wouldn’t be a Blueneck without file-sharing.’

I’m clearly not the only one who found out about Blueneck through word of virtual mouth before buying their album. Downloads, streams – whether legit or no – do little to further the economic ambitions of a band. But they’re what drive an audience to attend a gig, to buy a t-shirt, to invest in the vinyl.

‘We never expect to earn anything from album sales,’ he says. It makes me think of a ‘legal’ service like Spotify which may pay a cent for a thousand plays. Rich knows better than to expect to turn a profit from online services alone – I think they’d be lucky if they even managed to break even – but find me a 21st century band that does.

It’s a blessing, not a curse. Without the extrinsic motivation, or even the expectation, of making money off a recording, a band is free to focus on creating what they want to create, a listener less likely to be turned off by the ‘polish’ that coats anything released to achieve a commercial or economic result.

Rich concurs, even though I never say this out loud.

“We wouldn’t care if no one bought King Nine. It’s the album we wanted to make.”

Like this:

There was a time in my infancy when the dream of one day being able to talk to the peddlers of the sonic amphetamines that ruled my life was nothing more than that – a dream. One that would, if all went well, be realised in the afterlife.

I must have been very, very good (or very, very insistent) because it came true in less than a decade, further fueling my unshakable belief that the internet is, in fact, The Great Beyond.

Blueneck were around when I was building these castles in the sky, but it was only when my shoegaze dealer sent me a link to The Fallen Host that I came to know of them. This is also when I established: they will be mine, oh yes, they will be mine.